Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

The theme is battling your inner self/ your mental health, trying to…

- - - - The poem presents a woman hanging by her fingers from a window ledge 13 floors above the street. As she tries to decide whether or not she'll let go, she thinks of all the reasons that have led her to consider suicide: she feels broken in "several pieces between the two husbands she has had"; here in a crowded Chicago tenement, she is poor; she suffers from racial discrimination; she hears voices; she cries "for lost beauty." She considers her three young children and remembers her own childhood. The poem ends with the either/or choice still not made either she will fall to her death or she will climb back in the window and reclaim her life.
- - - - The poem describes a woman seeing herself growing older and older in a mirror each day. The poem explores Plath's own fears regarding aging and death. The mirror insists that it objectively reflects the truth—a truth that greets the woman who looks in the mirror each day as a "terrible" reminder of her own mortality. She searches the mirror for an image that reflects the way she sees herself and feels inside, yet finds only an increasingly older woman staring back.
- - - - At first glance, the poem describes a charming family scene: a father and son dance together in the kitchen, roughhousing and romping around. But the speaker supplies a number of hints that things aren’t quite as happy as they seem. The poem subtly reflects on the tension between fathers and sons tension that in turn may suggest undercurrents of violence.
- - - - Tracy K Smith uses personification and repetition to captivate her readers and leave us wondering what the poem is actually all about. She could actually be talking about an actual house or possibly using the idea of a house because something is home with all these different feelings and qualities.